Trump Launches “Game of Thrones” Showdown with Iran

New U.S. sanctions, first announced by President Trump in a tweet, will apply to companies anywhere in the world that do business with the Islamic Republic’s massive oil industry.

Photograph by Sarah Silbiger / NYT / Redux

In his weirdest foreign-policy ploy to date, President Trump issued a warning to Iran last week in a tweet inspired by the HBO fantasy show “Game of Thrones.” It featured a picture of himself with the caption—written in the show’s unique font—“SANCTIONS ARE COMING NOVEMBER 5.” The tweet foreshadowed the President’s decision to seal off Iran’s massive petroleum industry from global markets with sweeping penalties that went into effect on Monday. It’s no small step. Iran is OPEC’s third-largest oil producer. It sits on the planet’s fourth-largest reserves. (The United States ranks tenth.) The new sanctions are the toughest that Washington has ever imposed on Iran in a single day since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979—even tougher than the first sanctions issued when fifty-two diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran were held hostage for fourteen months.

Within hours of Trump’s tweet last week, Iran shot back with its own “Game of Thrones”-inspired tweet, featuring a profile of General Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s élite Quds Force, against an eerie black background. “I WILL STAND AGAINST YOU,” it was captioned, in English, also in the show’s special font. On his Instagram page, Suleimani added a personal note to Trump, writing, “Come! We are waiting. I can stop you. Quds Force can stop you. You start this war, but we will finish it.” The Iranian media covered the “Game of Thrones” competition with glee.

The Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from the historic 2015 Iran nuclear deal, in May, and reimpose punishing economic sanctions in two rounds, in August and November, is its most controversial foreign-policy decision. It’s roiled most of the world, as well as Iran.

Trump’s stated goal is twofold. First, it is to force Iran to renegotiate and accept tougher restrictions on its nuclear program as well as place comprehensive limits on its defensive and offensive missiles, support for extremist groups, human-rights abuses, and intervention across the Middle East. Second, it is to force changes in Iran’s “behavior,” or overhaul its policies. “Our ultimate goal is to convince the regime to abandon its current revolutionary course,” Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, said on Monday.

In Iran and among many American allies, however, the U.S. policy reversal is widely seen as a push for “regime change”—an attempt to spur a counter-revolution and an overhaul in Iran’s leadership. “We are in the war situation,” the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, warned in a nationally televised speech on Monday. “We are confronting a bullying enemy.” Since winning office, in 2013, Rouhani has staked his Presidency on negotiating with the United States to end tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and, in turn, end international sanctions and Tehran’s pariah status around the world. He achieved these goals in the deal brokered jointly with the world’s six major powers, in 2015. Rouhani, a centrist educated in Scotland, defied hard-line skeptics about the United States to do it. Now he is on the defensive.

Rouhani compared Trump’s attempt to destroy the accord—the most significant nonproliferation treaty in more than a quarter century—to the former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, in 1980. “Yesterday Saddam was in front us, today Trump is front of us. We must resist and win,” he said. The Iran-Iraq War raged for eight years; it remains the deadliest of all modern Middle East conflicts, with more than a million casualties.

Trump claims that his scheme has already had an impact. “Iran’s been a much different country” since he opted out of the accord, he boasted in Georgia, on Sunday. “When I came in, it was just a question of how long would it take them to take over the whole Middle East.”

Iran will suffer under the new U.S. sanctions. Iranian oil exports exports are expected to drop from a high of 2.3 million barrels a day, in September, 2017, to around a million barrels per day. Tehran had already been hit hard economically. Its currency has plummeted to less than a third of its value from a year ago. Prices of basic commodities have soared, along with inflation and unemployment. Hardships triggered protests in December and January in most of Iran’s thirty-one provinces.

U.S. sanctions will apply to companies anywhere in the world that either buy from or sell to the Islamic Republic. So, while France still embraces the deal with Iran, France’s largest oil company, Total, is terminating business there. Total can’t risk sanctions—or being cut off from the American market.

The Trump Administration is confident—critics say cocky—about its policy. “European companies have fled Iran in great numbers,” Pompeo said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” on Sunday. “The whole world understands that these sanctions are real, that they are important, that they drive the Iranian people’s opportunity to make the changes in Iran that they so desperately want and stop Iran from having the wealth and money that they need to continue to foment terror around the world.”

But Iran is far from being squeezed into submission. When I reported in Iran during the Iraq War, I checked grocery stores as a barometer of public hardships and government desperation. The shelves were often bare of basics. Meat, fuel, and other essentials were rationed, which generated a black market for food. Parents complained that they couldn’t get their kids to school due to gasoline shortages and limited public transportation. It’s different today. Despite rising costs and the psychology surrounding sanctions, which have been building for months, Iranian stores are well stocked, even with imported goods. Gasoline still sells at ninety cents a gallon. (It’s more than three dollars a gallon at many gas stations in Washington, D.C.)

Iran is still expected to sell some of its oil abroad, albeit at discounted prices. For all its bravado, the Trump Administration on Monday granted temporary waivers to eight countries—China, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey—that depend heavily on Iranian oil. Over time, these countries are still expected to reduce their purchases. The Administration hopes to eventually reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero, a highly unrealistic goal, given worldwide opposition to the President’s decision to pull out of the nuclear deal.

Trump’s announcement, in May, broke with the world’s five other major powers—Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia—all of whom have pledged to honor the deal. In a joint statement issued on Monday, the Europeans said that they “deeply regretted” Trump’s reimposition of sanctions. The deal “is a key element of the global nuclear non-proliferation architecture and of multilateral diplomacy, endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council.” In an open rebuke, the European powers are also creating a new international financial institution that will, according to the statement, “enable European exporters and importers to pursue legitimate trade” with Iran.

The divide between the United States and its European allies over Iran is the deepest foreign-policy split in the transatlantic alliance since it was created, after the Second World War. Europe has been particularly annoyed because the Trump Administration imposed terms so sweeping that Iran has little incentive to return to the negotiating table. In the meantime, Washington has no Plan B to prevent Iran from resuming its nuclear program.

Iran is exploiting this new divide. “Except for three or four countries, the entire world stands by Iran and the U.S. is isolated is unprecedented,” Rouhani said. “This is a great victory for the great people of Iran.” In a tweet, the Iranian Foreign Minister charged that the United States is so out of touch with reality that its sanctions list included a bank that closed six years ago and a ship that sank last year.

Rouhani, notably, did not rule out negotiating again with the United States. “You live up to your commitments and then we’ll talk,” he said. He is a lame duck, however, since the Islamic Republic limits its Presidents to serving two terms. His weakened influence will wane.

The escalating standoff between Tehran and Washington is reminiscent of the decade of tensions after Iran’s Revolution. On Sunday, Iran commemorated the anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Each year, to beef up the numbers of attendees, the government gives students the day off school and buses them to the former Embassy compound for a mass demonstration. Over the years, the fervor had dissipated. During one commemoration, the mastermind of the Embassy takeover said that it was time to heal relations with Washington—and invite the former hostages back as guests. But this year, the old passion was back. As the crowd burned American flags, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, invoked the failed U.S. military mission to rescue the hostages, in 1980. Eight American troops were killed in a helicopter crash. “Mr. Trump!” Jafari said. “Never threaten Iran because moans of the frightened U.S. forces in Tabas can still be heard.”

When sanctions were reimposed on Monday, I asked John Limbert, one of the diplomats who was held hostage in Iran for four hundred and forty-four days, to reflect on U.S. policy today. “The Iranian public has already put up with a lot,” he said. “It’s a dubious calculation that more economic pressure will stir up enough discontent to bring down the regime or force it to surrender. As the Iranians say, ‘There’s no color beyond black.’ ”